


When the Sun Shines Bright and Things Don’t Hurt

by BrujaBanter



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: A LOT of Angst, Anal Sex, Angst, But It's Still Not Ideal, Established Sirius Black/Remus Lupin, First War with Voldemort, Like Everyone's Into It, M/M, Oral Sex, Rough Oral Sex, Sexual Content, So What Do You Expect, Sort of dubious consent, Typical Cis Male Communication Failures, but it's not super graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:55:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24531913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrujaBanter/pseuds/BrujaBanter
Summary: There's a war. There's a spy. Remus and Sirius haven't kissed in ten days. And the bloody sun won't stop shining.ORThe unkind revelations of broken kettles and sexual tension.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 25
Kudos: 40





	When the Sun Shines Bright and Things Don’t Hurt

**Author's Note:**

> Probably not Properly British(TM) but I tried. Correct me in the comments.

It’s not just that they’ve forgotten what peacetime feels like.

They have. But it’s not just that.

They both know that once upon a time, the sun felt like freedom, like respite. Now it’s the thing that reveals everything they can pretend to ignore at night. It feels like being easier to spot by the Death Eaters who wander around these parts of London, looking, lurking. It feels like the thing they wait to go down, so they can finally breathe (for a while anyway) until it comes up again.

It always comes up again.

Sirius is the first to wake, an oddity in their house, but Remus was out until Merlin-knows-when doing Merlin-knows-what, so he’ll probably be asleep for hours yet. Sirius feels relieved at this, so he also feels immediately guilty. But the less time they spend awake together, the less time they spend dancing awkwardly around subjects neither of them want to talk about and questions neither of them can answer.

Sirius glances at Remus’s side of the bed and finds him sleeping deeply, right hand cradled under his ear, drooling from slightly-parted lips. Pink, rose petal lips. Lips Sirius hasn’t touched with his own in so many days he’s lost count. Remus doesn’t move in his sleep, never has, wakes in exactly the same position he fell asleep in, which means Remus fell asleep last night looking at him. Which means Remus came to bed last night with the intention of looking at him. Which means Remus wasn’t doing everything in his power to pretend like his flatmate-bedmate-lover-partner didn’t exist. Which means Sirius is a right git.

Remus sleeps like the dead, but Sirius still exits their room like he’s trying not to wake a sleeping Hippogriff. He closes the door more gently than he’s maybe ever done anything and tiptoes on socked feet to the kitchen to make himself coffee before his meeting with Dumbledore. He thinks maybe he’d rather drink arsenic. He knows what Dumbledore intends to discuss with him, knows he suspects a spy in the Order. Knows Dumbledore intends to ask Sirius about Remus. Knows Dumbledore thinks it could be Remus.

Here’s the thing: Sirius _knows_ it is not Remus. He knows this like he knows his own name, like he knows every secret passageway out of Hogwarts, like he knows exactly what will happen if he runs his finger down the scar on Remus’s right side, the one he got during a playful (and maybe slightly sexually frustrated) fight between Moony and Padfoot their sixth year.

But he doesn’t know how to say this to Dumbledore, doesn’t know how to say “I’d see it in his eyes” or “I’d feel it in his hands” or “I wouldn’t be able to come inside him”. So he plans to say a whole lot of nothing. And he knows Dumbledore will not take this well.

He is in the middle of playing the potential conversation over and over in his mind, staring out the window at the sunny, perfect fucking arsehole of a morning outside, leaning against the kitchen sink with a mug of still-too-hot coffee in his hands when something brushes up against his bare back and he spills said still-too-hot coffee right down his bare chest.

“Bugger!” Sirius shouts, dropping the mug into the sink with a clatter and reaching reflexively for the tea towel hanging from the oven handle.

“Sorry,” Remus says, jumping back as if he too has just been scalded by steaming hot coffee. “I thought you knew I was behind you.”

“How would I know you were behind me? Got psychic powers now, do I?” Sirius responds with what he knows is an inappropriate amount of anger, blotting at his reddening skin with the towel.

“Let me,” Remus says, and moves towards Sirius. Sirius wants to shout at Remus, insist he can take care of himself and storm off to the bathroom, but instead he puts up no resistance when Remus takes the towel from his hands and wets it with cool water before returning it to Sirius’s flat belly.

“Why are you awake?” Sirius says. It sounds like an accusation, even to his own ears.

“There’s dittany in the bathroom, I’ll go get some,” Remus says, ignoring him, and drops the towel on the counter before turning his (shirtless, freckled, bloody _sexy_ ) back to Sirius and heading towards the bathroom.

When Remus returns with a small jar of salve, Sirius is in the exact same position, hands grasping the counter behind him as if afraid that to move at all would shatter the moment like a framed picture.

“You didn’t wake me,” Remus says, now dabbing cooling dittany on Sirius’s blistering skin. And _Goddamned Remus_ , pretending like Sirius was worried he’d woken Remus out of concern and not utter cowardice. 

Sirius could ask Remus where he was last night. Should ask Remus where he was last night. But he’s not sure he actually wants to know the answer, and Remus’s fingers on his skin feel _so good_ , so he doesn’t say anything, just lets Remus rub ointment on him for what he’s sure is far more time than is necessary for basic efficacy.

“I’m sorry,” Remus says again, fingering the waistband of Sirius’s pants, but this time Sirius has the distinct impression the apology has nothing to do with spilt coffee.

He should speak up, should reassure Remus and apologize for his own unreasonable reaction, and he’s about to, _really_ he is, but then Remus’s lips replace his fingers and he’s placing open mouthed kisses on Sirius’s torso, and then lower, pulling down Sirius’s briefs with pleading eyes that Sirius answers by not saying anything. And then those lips are on the crook between Sirius’s thigh and his balls. And then they’re ghosting breath over Sirius’s hardening cock. And now Sirius doesn’t have plans to say much of anything at all.

Sirius doesn’t mean to, but his hand releases its death grip on the counter behind him and comes to grip, just as hard, in Remus’s hair, bringing Remus’s mouth to the head of Sirius’s cock in a way that would have been less dubious a few months ago, and now seems a little risky, and Sirius is even more of a git because he almost doesn’t care.

Remus opens his mouth obediently anyway, not hesitating in the slightest before he’s taking Sirius’s cock into his mouth and sucking desperately around the length, still hardening as Remus works, and Sirius begins to thrust into the familiar wet heat.

“ _Fuck_ , Moony,” Is all Sirius says as he shuts his eyes tight and continues to grip Remus’s head with his hand, bucking into his mouth as if they’d said more than ten words to each other in as many days.

Remus hums, looks up and trains wide, trusting eyes on Sirius’s face and it _breaks_ him, the way Remus trusts him enough to give him his mouth and his breath and his heart and suddenly Sirius is _furious_ , furious at what Dumbledore suspects and Sirius doesn’t, and furious at the way Remus probably knows and will still let Sirius fuck his face anyway, and furious at this war, and furious at the sun for still shining when everything is so bloody fucking dark.

Before he can process how or why, he is yanking Remus to his feet and spinning him around, harsh and sudden, against their kitchen table. He brings one bruising hand against the nape of Remus’s neck to bend him so his torso is flush with the solid wood they used to feed James and Lily and Peter off of back when there was time and energy for shared meals. Remus is moaning appreciatively, bringing one hand behind him to try to grasp at Sirius’s thigh, and later Sirius will tell himself that this is why he pulls Remus’s pajama pants down, why he spreads Remus’s legs open with his knee and plunges two fingers inside of him, slick with a wandless lubrication spell.

Later, he will tell himself that it’s Remus’s high-pitched, exceedingly desperate “fuck me, Sirius” that makes him line his cock up with Remus’s hole and push, hard, into Remus’s body, past any resistance, and fuck him so hard and fast it moves the entire table with every thrust. He’ll tell himself it’s horniness borne of days of abstinence that makes him chant Remus’s name with every rhythmic thrust, that it’s this same purely sexual desire that makes him reach around Remus’s body and grip his cock with so much determination they might as well be dying – which, it so happens, maybe they were – and jerk him to completion so determinedly it’s as if Remus’s shuddering “ _Oh God, Pads”_ is Sirius’s very life force. It’s only in the few seconds of ecstasy when Sirius is coming deep inside Remus’s now limp body that he admits to himself that maybe this _is_ his very life force.

Sirius takes several deep breaths, sweaty body draped over Remus’s and hand rubbing Remus’s hip so slowly and carefully he hopes Remus won’t even notice, and then he pulls out of Remus’s body, tucks himself back into his briefs and heads towards their shared bathroom to shower without even a glance back.

It’s not until Sirius is out the door and pulling his wand out of his pocket to disapparate that he realizes they still didn’t kiss.

* * *

Remus remembers a time when he couldn’t wait for the sun to come up. After long nights tearing through his own skin in a ramshackle shed, and then a cold, lonely shack, and then a still-cold-but-less-lonely shack, the sun was a welcome friend. He’d open his sore eyes and they’d scream in protest at the light, but Remus would ignore it, because the light meant 29 and a half more days (give or take) until his bones cracked again and his voice broke into a howl.

But lately, all he wants is the moon. The reminder that once a month, he breaks into a creature that wants only blood and flesh and doesn’t care where it comes from. Once a month, he is a being that doesn’t know good from bad or wrong from right, that doesn’t pick the losing side even if it’s the right side. That just _survives_. Lately, the more time he spends with the packs of werewolves driven out of society by the mere _possibilities_ of the moon, the more he wants to join them. The unambiguousness of survival calls to him, and the more he reminds himself why he has to fight the more he has a hard time pinpointing why, exactly, he has to fight.

He shuts his eyes against the sunlight that peaks through the bedroom curtains no matter how harshly he spells them closed and tries to get some more sleep. When he got in last night it was past five, and he’d barely managed to shower off dirt and blood before collapsing on the bed next to a sleeping Sirius. Remus had looked over at him, the way his skin positively glows in the moonlight like just one more of a thousand ironies in Remus’s life, and wondered how much longer they could go on like this. How much more time they could continue to pretend.

Here’s the thing: Remus knows it has to be Sirius. There were only so many people who knew the kinds of things being passed to Voldemort, only so many people who The Order trusted with the growing number of odd and mystical and magical pieces of information crowding all of their heads. And it wasn’t that Remus thought Sirius was _prone_ to darkness, per se, he just knew that Sirius didn’t resist things once there was a reason for him to stop. He knew Sirius could be talked into just about anything with just the right amount of persuasion, and if there’s one thing The Dark Lord is, it’s persuasive.

The problem, moreso, was that Remus didn’t seem to care. He _loved_ them, loved James and Lily and Peter and Frank and Alice and Marlene and Dumbledore and even Mundungus. He loved them so much that sometimes he thought it would kill him. But that must not be enough to make him care, because when it came down to it, he didn’t love anyone or anything the way he loved Sirius. He knew this, because even if Sirius was the spy, passing crucial information about the people he loved to their enemies, Remus would still love him more than anything. He’d hate Sirius, never speak to him again, but he’d never stop loving him. And for Remus, whose morals were as black and white as Sirius’s hair in the snow angels they made during Christmas break fifth year, that must mean he simply didn’t care. He was still here, after all, in the bed he shared with a possibly murderous traitor. And all he could think about was the way Sirius’s cock felt pulsing inside him as he came all over the kitchen table this morning.

He’s drifting in and out of restless sleep when he feels more than hears the front door close, because whoever is here (and it must be Sirius, because no one else lives here and Remus doesn’t have the energy to be concerned with a break-in right now) slams the door so hard it sends shockwaves through the far wall of their bedroom. He has just enough time to consider if he can reasonably pretend to have slept through it when he hears the kitchen sink turn on, and then the fridge open, and then the sound of something distinctly breakable shattering against what Remus can only assume is the floor. And he couldn’t ignore that even if he had been sleeping, so he pulls his dressing gown off the bedpost and wraps it around himself before starting towards the kitchen, suddenly feeling so much more exhausted than he already was.

“Is that the kettle?” Remus asks far too calmly, although he knows it is (because what else would it be?) and he knows asking the question will not elicit anything resembling helpful, but what else is he supposed to say? At midnight, in his kitchen, with his live-in partner pacing the small space between sofa and kitchen table, fists clenched at his sides, and pieces of Remus’s admittedly old but rather beloved kettle strewn about the floor?

“What are you DOING here?” Sirius shouts. He stops pacing, turns on the spot, and stares daggers at Remus. His face is red and his long hair even more disheveled than usual, and Remus thinks he looks more deranged than he does upset. _What do you expect from a Death Eater?_ Remus asks himself, and hates himself for it.

“I live here,” Remus says, rather less exasperatedly than he could have, because this is the second time today he has appeared in his own kitchen only to be immediately questioned about what he is doing there.

“I fucking know that, I just figured you’d be–“ Sirius starts, but cuts himself off. He rips his gaze from Remus so harshly it’s like he has to fight his own eyeballs to do so. “It’s too bloody _hot_ for _tea,_ Remus,” He says, in apparent explanation for the shards of ceramic on their kitchen floor.

Remus just blinks, is about to point out that seasons _change_ and he rather likes a cuppa year-round, thank you, but suddenly everything is too absurd. All of it is too absurd. It all starts to swirl together in his head, disjointed thoughts and ignored feelings, and Remus thinks maybe he’ll go ahead and pass out. It is, he realizes, _stiflingly_ hot in their flat, and he thinks back to Sirius, just weeks out of Hogwarts, telling Remus this very flat had “too many bloody windows” and they’d “cook like buggering…” (Sirius never cooked, didn’t cook, so couldn’t finish his analogy, and just looked with what could only be described as puppy dog eyes at Remus, who smiled and shrugged and said “it’ll be nice to have a little sun” and _didn’t_ say “since things are getting so dark anyway” and then Sirius was agreeing to rent the flat and then they were naked on the overly-sunned floor…)

“Moony?” The room steadies and Sirius is somehow much closer to Remus now, one hand on his overheating side (why had he bothered with the dressing gown?) and the other resting knuckle-side atop Remus’s forehead the way a mother checks her child for temperature. “Moony, what’s wrong?”

Unreasonable, how quickly Sirius can go from looking entirely, maddeningly unhinged to charmingly concerned in what Remus can only assume has only been a few seconds.

 _Everything_ , he thinks, _everything is wrong_. “Just…flushed,” is what he actually says in response, and his voice is much smaller and quieter than he intended it to be.

“Come sit,” Sirius says, and leads him towards their overstuffed sofa, helping Remus down onto it. “I’ll get you water.”

Remus wants to quip _think I’d like a spot of tea, actually_ but he doesn’t. He couldn’t, even if things weren’t so palpably _not_ normal between them. His throat feels stuck together and he thinks maybe his tongue has stopped working.

He takes the water Sirius hands him with shaking hands and brings it to his lips, hoping it will loosen the glue surrounding his vocal cords, and drinks it down greedily. Sirius just watches him, face very close to his own, something entirely untraceable lurking behind his eyes.

“Thanks,” Remus squeaks, handing the glass back to Sirius and wondering, halfheartedly, if Sirius will break that too.

Instead, though, Sirius closes the distance between their faces and _kisses_ Remus, hard and determined tongue seeking out Remus’s own, and he gives it to him. Jerks his head back a bit at the unexpectedness of it, but gives it to him, because he’d give Sirius anything, has given Sirius everything, so what is his tongue or his mouth or his breath or his life, really.

Sirius must know this, because they will both run out of air very soon for how hard Sirius is snogging him. But Sirius has always been greedy, so he pushes Remus down onto the sofa and throws his legs over Remus to straddle him and has both his hands clasped around Remus’s face now, holding it still as if he’s afraid it will run off on its own.

After many moments, Sirius finally pulls away from the kiss, both of them gasping into the air they’ve been sharing between them, but he keeps his hands steady on Remus’s face. Sirius stares at him, stares harder than anyone has ever done anything, stares so hard Remus is sure Sirius must be able to see through his head and to the fabric of the sofa below. Sirius has always held every emotion in his stark, grey eyes, and right now Remus sees in them the same swirl of emotions he also feels, the same swirl still making him dizzy. Lust and love and pain and fear and…something else, entirely.

“It can’t be you,” Sirius whispers, as if he’s speaking to no one in particular, though his gaze bores into Remus.

“What?” Remus asks, still breathing heavily.

He thinks he sees tears start to well in Sirius’s eyes, until he realizes that maybe the tears are coming from his own eyes, because oh. _Oh_. Avoiding each other in a one bedroom flat and Sirius growing so distant Remus thinks maybe he is cheating on him and breaking kettles on the kitchen floor and fucking Remus over the kitchen table and _oh._

Suddenly he realizes. Sirius doesn’t suspect Remus of suspecting _him_ , he…suspects Remus. Full stop. Because of the secrets and the reticent disclosures and the holding things so close to his chest, and because of the wolf. The fucking wolf.

Sirius is still staring daggers into Remus, but now he is sure Sirius is crying, and suddenly Remus _knows_. Knows that even if things somehow turn out okay, even if they all somehow survive this mess of a war, they will never recover from this moment. Something has broken, permanent and unfixable.

Remus lets out a long, shuddering breath he didn’t know he’d been holding in. He wants to scream. He _is_ crying. And he’s not felt so relieved in years.

“It can’t be you,” Remus echoes back, but while Sirius means _I think it’s you and I don’t want it to be_ , Remus means _it can’t be you if you think it’s me_ and _thank Merlin-and-muggle-Jesus it’s not you_ , and he is _laughing_. He must look insane. He must look _guilty_. In this moment, he does not care. Later, he will care more than he’s ever cared about anything. But right now, he arches his back off the sofa just enough to fully remove the dressing gown he shouldn’t have put on in the first place. Neither he nor Sirius close their eyes, break the gaze that says _everything_ because they’re afraid if they do the things will go back to being unsaid, and that’s somehow worse. So they kiss with their eyes open, zero finesse to their movements as teeth clash with teeth, and Remus is still laughing, and Sirius is still crying, and now Remus knows Sirius must love him morethananythingdangerouslymuch too, because Remus looks twice as deranged as Sirius and Sirius is still reaching down to palm Remus through his pajama bottoms.

Remus growls into Sirius’s mouth – because if he’s going to be a wolf, he’s going to _be a wolf_ – and nearly rips Sirius’s t-shirt in two trying to get it over his head. He angles up to wrap his lips around one of Sirius’s nipples, and he bites. Not gently. He rolls it between his front teeth and he’s too dizzy to remember if Sirius likes this or not but he must because he is bucking into Remus, head thrown back and moaning so deeply it might as well be a growl.

Remus wants to say something, something like _thank you_ and _how dare you_ all at the same time, but what he actually says is “look at me, Sirius,” because without Sirius’s eyes on his he’s afraid everything around them will disappear.

Sirius looks at him, meets Remus’s eyes with his own and Remus is still biting and Sirius is still bucking, his clothed cock meeting Remus’s somewhere in the vicinity of near each other.

It’s not nearly enough. Remus fumbles with Sirius’s belt, and then the button at his fly, meanwhile not breaking eye contact with Sirius. He barely blinks, just stares as Sirius gapes down at him, fascinated grey orbs watching the tongue now swirling patterns over Sirius’s heavily abused nipple.

Sirius is panting and growling and moaning and saying his name, “Remus…Remus…Moony, please…” and when Remus finally removes Sirius’s cock from his pants, just enough to wrap one hand around it, Sirius stops begging but Remus thinks it’s not because he’s been given what he wants.

Remus briefly pauses to consider how he wants to do this, how he wants to fuck Sirius, because he knows intrinsically that they’ll never do it again and he doesn’t know how to decide the correct way to fit their bodies together for the last time. He considers wrapping one arm around Sirius’s torso, flipping them both so Sirius is beneath him and Remus can feel himself inside Sirius’s body. He considers sucking Sirius off, milking his cum from him one last time and swallowing it all so at least some part of Sirius stays inside his body for a little bit longer. But in the end, nothing will feel right, and this is the way they came together the first time – dry cocks brushing together and tongues tangled in each other’s mouths, both of them moaning as loud as they dared into the darkness of the air around Remus’s bed, James and Peter asleep on the opposite side of their dorm room – so this is the way they’ll come together for the last time, too.

Remus detaches his lips from Sirius’s chest and reattaches them to Sirius’s mouth and he thinks maybe he can taste blood, but the only light in the room is coming from the lamp on the table by the door so it’s dark enough for them to both pretend like blood doesn’t matter if you can’t see the red. At some point, Remus must have pulled his own pajama pants down far enough that his cock bobs freely against his stomach, and Sirius is grinding his own cock into Remus’s so clumsily that they might as well be back in their dorm at Hogwarts.

“Shh,” Remus says to Sirius, something like serenity in his voice, “slow down, Pads. It’s okay, slow down.”

He doesn’t mean it, he can’t mean it, because nothing is okay. But if Sirius doesn’t slow down they are both going to come too soon, and then it will be over.

Sirius is sobbing now, probably, or they’re both sweating profusely from the heat, or there really is blood, or some combination of all three, and their skin is damp everywhere as it slides together.

Sirius slows, but he stops kissing Remus, moves instead to bury his head in Remus’s neck and lick at the spot above Remus’s collarbone. Remus has nothing to do with his mouth now, nothing to do but turn thoughts into words, so he silences the thoughts by whispering anything and everything and nothing into the space between their damp bodies. He says, “yes, Sirius” and “fuck, Sirius” and “that’s it, Sirius” and “I want you to come for me, Sirius” and at some point he thinks maybe he is just trying to say Sirius’s name in any way he can, because he’s worried once this is over he’ll break if he tries to say his name again.

“Remus, I can’t–“ Sirius says into Remus’s neck, his thrusts still slower but more erratic now, his hands gripping Remus’s shoulders so hard Remus will find finger-shaped bruises there tomorrow.

“I know, Pads,” Remus says back. (Apparently, he can’t say Sirius’s name anymore, already.) He doesn’t want this to end, but he never will, so he says, “It’s okay. Let go, baby. Come with me.”

He hasn’t called Sirius “baby” in ages, not since James overheard him once and teased them mercilessly for the better part of a week. But he does now, because it’s another thing he’ll never be able to say to Sirius again. And because he knows it’ll push Sirius over the edge. And because he wants to.

Sirius comes first, with a sob of Remus’s name, but he keeps jerking his hips even after he’s thoroughly coated Remus’s stomach in his release. Remus comes not long after, Sirius’s softening cock still sliding over his, and as he does he grips Sirius’s hair and kisses his temple in a way he has never once done during sex. It feels tender and reverent and a little bit protective. It feels final. It feels like a christening.

They both take much longer than necessary to catch their breath as they lay slumped against each other, clinging to each other’s bodies, Sirius’s head still resting in the crook of Remus’s neck. Remus has the thought that maybe they will fall asleep like this, maybe they’ll wake up here in the morning and things will look different, look better. But then he remembers the way that mornings now feel like nothing but rude reminders that the sun will still come up no matter how inappropriate it is, no matter how many people they lost the night before. He knows that in the light of day, they’d have to face the mess of dried cum and sweat and tears and blood, the mess they’ve made of each other’s bodies and souls.

So instead Remus makes a small movement, like something loosening, and Sirius takes the hint. He sighs deeply into Remus’s neck and says “okay”, says it like it’s the last thing he’ll ever say, and then he gets up, zips himself back into his jeans and heads towards the bathroom. Remus allows himself a moment of fleeting worry that Sirius will cut himself on the broken kettle. Then he remembers it’s too late to worry about small cuts and broken skin.

Remus gets up slowly, steadily, and gathers a few of his things. (There aren’t many.) He thinks to repair the kettle, but he’s always been a sucker for poetry, so he lets it lie broken and shattered on the kitchen floor and envies the way it has fragmented so cleanly. He leaves it for Sirius to deal with in the morning, when Remus is long gone and this time not coming back. It will be easier to see the shards then, anyway, what with the daylight and the windows and the sun. He closes the front door behind him with a little bit of remaining hope that some things are easier in the sunlight.

End.

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written fanfic in a MINUTE. Tell me how I did in the comments. If you want. I'm not telling you what to do. But I'd appreciate it.
> 
> Fic title comes from "Brooklyn" by Angel Haze. You can listen to this masterpiece (and support a rad black queer artist) [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rbeHssuB4k).


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